L'Inferno -1911- Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy - The first full-length Italian feature film

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"L'Inferno" took over three years to make and was the first full-length Italian feature film ever made. The film was first screened in Naples in the Teatro Mercadante on March 10, 1911. The film was an international success, taking more than $2 million in the United States alone. "(Using Google Translate) The film is composed of 54 scenes. Faithfully recounts the first canto of the Divine Comedy, a series of animated tableaux inspired by the illustrations of Gustave Doré. In the dark forest Dante meets Virgil, and with him begins the distance between the circles and the Malebolge, where he met all the famous characters of the poem. In Caina hears the story of Count Ugolino and then they see Lucifer with three heads, tearing a man who struggles, before being able "to see the stars." Each scene uses special effects in a realistic function: the lustful dragged by the storm (overlay), the open side of Muhammad, the severed head of Bertrand de Born (multiple exposure), the transformation of the thieves in snakes (replaced by assembly). From the point of view of film technique there is known a whole series of joints of the frame to break the monotony of the typical mean field along and fixed: there are riquadrature (displacements of the frame of the machine, the simplest type of camera movement) , assembly of more shots, with different scale of plans, etc.., with the technical features common between 1908 and 1910. but we can not yet speak of assembly used as a narrative, that is to urge the history and characterization of the characters: the frame is selected according to the special effects and the visual spectacle, in fact we are still in the realm of so-called cinema of attractions, ie where the visual part is predominant in relation to related story (which in the end is only a pretext to stage effects special), even if you are paving the way narrative cinema that will bring a little later, in 1914, the cornerstone of Cabiria Giovanni Pastrone." The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia) is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, "halfway along our life's path" . Dante is thirty-five years old, lost in a dark wood (understood as sin) assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight way" -- also translatable as "right way" -- to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "low place" where the sun is silent , Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life: Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious. These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell, outside the city of Dis, for the four sins of indulgence (lust, gluttony, avarice, anger); Circle 7 for the sins of violence; and Circles 8 and 9 for the sins of malice (fraud and treachery). Added to these are two unlike categories that are specifically spiritual: Limbo, in Circle 1, contains the virtuous pagans who were not sinful but were ignorant of Christ, and Circle 6 contains the heretics who contradicted the doctrine and confused the spirit of Christ. The circles number 9, with the addition of Satan completing the structure of 9 + 1 = 10. Directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan , Giuseppe de Liguoro (collaboration) Cinematography by Emilio Roncarolo Production Design by Francesco Bertolini , Sandro Properzi Second Unit Director Giuseppe de Liguoro Art Department Francesco Bertolini, Sandro Properzi Release date Italy, 10 March 1911 (Naples) Film length 1200 m (Four reels) Production Co: Milano Film, SAFFI-Comerio (distribution) Ressources:Wikipedia.org, imdb.com New soundtrack and dubbing: Cinema History Channel Music: Kevin Mac Leod (incompetch.com) licensed under Creative Commons licence: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/